[New post] Ex-logger warns that activists are making ag, water their next targets
Jeff Rice posted: "Environmental opportunists hijacked the timber industry's environmental movement, ultimately harming the industry and the forests it was trying to save. Bruce Vincent, a former logger turned forestry activist, told several hundred farmers, ranchers and" Sterling Journal-Advocate
Environmental opportunists hijacked the timber industry's environmental movement, ultimately harming the industry and the forests it was trying to save.
Bruce Vincent, a former logger turned forestry activist, told several hundred farmers, ranchers and other agricultural folk attending the 2023 Colorado Conference on Agriculture in Westminster last week that they need find common ground with environmentalists so they can help guide discussions that affect their industries.
Bruce Vincent
Vincent, who grew up in a logging family in northwestern Montana and had his own successful logging business for many years, said the initial work by environmentalists to save the forests of the Pacific Northwest was crucial to making changes in the logging industry. Instead of clear-cutting – cutting down every tree in a tract – loggers had to learn how to be selective and to develop new machinery to surgically remove trees. The result, he said, was better-managed forests and more efficient logging.
But some in the environmental movement saw money to be made, Vincent said, and "started saving America to death." The activists pushed an image of a "Disneyesque ectopia" and presented a binary choice; either restore a pristine world, never to be spoiled by humans, or do nothing and allow the beauty of America to be destroyed forever by rapacious industry.
"They hijacked our movement and turned it into the eco-conflict movement," he said. "In order for them to make money, there had to be good guys and bad guys so they could pull dollars out of America's pockets, and guess what? We were the bad guys. We didn't see it coming."
The result was legislation that meant almost no management of forests, which allowed national parks and forests to become overgrown, resulting in devastating wildfires that kill whole mountainsides, leaving heat-sterilized land that takes decades to rebuild.
"Preserve or destroy are not the only choices," Vincent said, "but the public doesn't know this."
Vincent said that, in order to regain some control over the forestry environmental movement, loggers had to become involved in political action.
"Democracy is not a spectator sport," he said. "When people lead, leaders follow. The world is run by those who show up."
While the timber industry has regained its voice in environmentalism, Vincent warned that production agriculture is already becoming the "next piñata." He said animal welfare and water will the fronts that activists attack on, and they will form the narrative in their own terms. He said social norms make it easy to vilify industry, agri-business and "factory farms."
The solution, Vincent said, is to meet the activists face to face and listen to them, and then to lead regulatory reform. Angry confrontation, he said, won't work; it will only confirm agriculture's position as "the bad guy."
"You have to listen to what they have to say," Vincent said. "And then you tell them, 'I'm listening, I understand, I share your concerns. I am the answer.'"
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